Our Thoughts on Pardot

Pardot has an interesting history. After being acquired by ExactTarget in 2012, ExactTarget was then acquired by Salesforce for a staggering $2.5 billion in 2013.

As you might expect, Pardot integrates nicely with Salesforce, and provides a lot of additional insight and marketing strength to the CRM. Our only major critique of Pardot is in relation to their pricing.

Starting at $1,000/month, Pardot is primarily aimed at B2B organizations, ranging from SMB to enterprise-level. While $1,000 / month is not unreasonable for a powerful marketing automation tool, many of Pardot’s most interesting features only become available beyond their $2,000 / month package.

Pardot User Reviews

Pardot's Pros and Cons

While quite expensive, Pardot is a great marketing automation tool for those looking to improve the power and insight of their Salesforce CRM.

Pros

Lead Deck – Pardot’s Lead Deck gives you real time activity updates of prospect’s activity. If a prospect visits your services page, you can receive an update on your screen, and send them an email in one-click.

Easily Customizable – Pardot is one of the few marketing automation tools that allows you to customize the tool to your needs.

Good Salesforce integration – As you might expect, having been acquired by Salesforce, their integration with the Salesforce CRM is pretty good.

Great customer support – Pardot receive a lot of good praise for their customer support & training.

Cons

Not many integrations – While Pardot does have native integration with most of the popular CRMs, they only have 32 third-party apps, which is significantly less than other tools, such as Marketo.

API access only available to PRO users – In combination with a limited number of apps, Pardot’s API is only available to customers paying for their $2,000/month package.

A/B testing only available to PRO users – Again, if you want to make use of features such as A/B testing, AdWords integration, or dynamic email content, you’ll need to pay at least $2,000/month.

Pardot Integrations

Pardot has 32 integrations with third-party platforms. We have listed some of the most commonly used ones below:

Pardot User Reviews

We have a midsize AE/SDR team selling SAAS services. This system was overpriced and complete failure for our organization.

In less than one year we have opened 42 support tickets with Pardot. Many with no resolution. After determining that the product simply doesn't work we are transitioning to Hubspot. Pardot is still forcing us to pay licensing fees even though their product failed to function. Do not use.

Stand Out Issues:

- The gmail plugin simply doesn't work. Activity is not consistently logged in SalesForce. We have reported the technical issue many times to their support.

- They cap uploaded assets (Ex: images) at 100 MB storage. This is ridiculous. When we hit the cap they wanted to charge us 4K to increase storage.

- Poor reporting on emails:
* Missing data on 1:1 emails. Direct emails sent via the Gmail plug-in.
* CTR doesn’t show for under 1% in engagement studio > Requires us to click down into each email template to pull report and export details to do a side by side comparison
* There are no reports generated for engagement studio (only drip programs - old feature now retired)

- Limited on engage logic, can only use prospect fields. We can't use opportunity or account data in automation.

This has been the worst software experience in my 17 years of running this business. Even after explaining all of the issues above they refused to let us exit our contract. It's really bad business. We are continuing to use the the CRM from SalesForce but this relationship has been soured. I requested that they transfer the fees we paid on Pardot to SalesForce licenses and they declined. Don't fall into this trap.

12th June 2017, 6:12 pm

Overall1

Ease of Use1

Customer Support1

5

11

Alternatives to Pardot

Sharpspring is an ideal marketing automation tool for agencies or fast-growing businesses. While quite a bit less expensive than Pardot, it still has many of the same features including call-tracking, marketing automation & CRM.

Infusionsoft is one of the best marketing automation platforms for companies with 2-25 members of staff. Aimed at small businesses, their pricing is slightly more affordable than Pardot, with many of the same features.

Starting at $9 per month, ActiveCampaign are by far the most cost-effective marketing automation tool out there, as well as being one of the best-designed all-in-one marketing automation, email marketing & CRM tools. We use them, and highly recommend them!